Almost as soon as the first Israeli missile struck the Gaza Strip, a
veteran cheering squad suited up to support the home team. “Israel is
so scrupulous about civilian life,” Charles Krauthammer claimed in the
Washington Post. Echoing Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz called the
Israeli attack on Gaza, “Perfectly ‘Proportionate.'” And in the New
York Times, Israeli historian Benny Morris described his country’s
airstrikes as “highly efficient.”

While the cheerleaders testified to the superior moral fiber of their
team, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted. Israeli missiles
tore at least fifteen Palestinian police cadets to shreds at a
graduation ceremony, blew twelve worshipers to pieces (including six
children) while they left evening prayers at a mosque, flattened the
elite American International School, killed five sisters while they
slept in their beds, and liquidated 9 women and children in order to
kill a single Hamas leader. So far, Israeli forces have killed at
least 500 Gazans and wounded some two thousand, including hundreds of
children. Yesterday, the IDF blanketed parts of Gaza with white
phosphorus, a chemical weapon Saddam Hussein once deployed against
Kurdish rebels. (more…)

Each year, more than one and a half million visitors stream through the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Fairborn.

Walking between the cavernous early flight and World War II hangars, tourists, veterans and school groups must pass through a replica of the main gate of Auschwitz and into Prejudice and Memory: A Mobile Holocaust Exhibit.

The exhibit, curated by local survivor Renate Frydman on behalf of the Dayton Holocaust Resource Center, has been on permanent display at the Air Force museum since 1999.

It is the museum’s way of illustrating why the United States goes to war: to defeat the tyranny that destroys human freedom.

But according to Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation — and his son and daughter-in-law Casey and Amanda Weinstein of Fairborn — Wright-Patterson Air Force base is a “hotbed” of “unconstitutional religious intolerance.” (more…)

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, has manged to so far escape reprisal from voters for his connections to some of the most scurrilous members of the right wing christian evangelical movement . He “made up” with Jerry Falwell, has visited and made supportive public statements about that hot bed of evangelical indoctrination other wise known as Bob Jones “University”. He has been ecstatic about the support of megachurch preachers like Ohio’s Ron Parsley, who says, speaking about Islam,

“The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore

“I want to say it again, and again, and again: Islam is not a religion, it is a political system meant on — bent on world domination, not a religion. It masquerades as a religion, but the religion covers a worldwide attempt to exercise power and to subjugate the world to their way of thinking.”

But what is disturbing is how little attention continues to be paid to Senator MCain’s ongoing pandering to far right wing evangelicals.

Frank Rich, my favorite NY Times columnist, wrote about Hagee’s views this past Sunday and provided a url address to one of “pastor” Hagee’s outrageous rantings on YouTube, shown below. You have to see it to believe it. As a very lapsed Catholic I have no great fondness for the Catholic church’s positions on many issues, from gay’s to abortion…but when I viewed this video the hair on my neck literally stood up.

This guy is a complete NUT JOB, A WACKO LUNATIC FRINGER...who happens to have very large following. And John McCain refuses to disavow Hagee or any of of the other racist, homophobic, war mongering preachers, while his seemingly Teflon coated status insulates him from the same kind of media firestorm surrounding Barack Obama’s relationship with Rev Wright. Rev. Wright never had the unmitigated gall to come even close to the vitriolic and malignant statements made by Hagee in this much under viewed video. McCain desperately needs the pro-life Catholic vote, wider exposure of Hagees rantings will help to undermine that strategy.

It isn’t enough to just watch the video, that is far too passive. As offended as I??

Tell Mr McCain:

You can contact the Senator at

DC Address:

The Honorable John McCain
United States Senate
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-0303

This is a link to an extensive interview that the Buzzflash bloggers conducted with Cliff Schecter, the author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn’t. Schecter has collected real evidence regarding McCain’s temper tantrums, his vitriol, his flip flop position changing and much much more.

Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling? And here’s the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the “success” of the President’s surge strategy, Americans sense this perfectly well. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 56% of Americans “say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties” and this has, as the Post notes, been a majority position since January 2007, the month that the surge was first announced. Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq — and of thinking in Washington. So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which should be asked far more often in this country:

1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military’s worst Iraq nightmare: Few now remember, but before George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, top administration and Pentagon officials had a single overriding nightmare — not chemical, but urban, warfare. Saddam Hussein, they feared, would lure American forces into “Fortress Baghdad,” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled it. There, they would find themselves fighting block by block, especially in the warren of streets that make up the Iraqi capital’s poorest districts. (more…)

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and President Bill Clinton at a prayer breakfast at the White House in September 1998.

During one of the most difficult periods in the presidency of Bill Clinton, he addressed a group of clerics at an annual prayer breakfast in September 1998 just as the Starr report outlining his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was about to be published.

Among those in attendance, was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is seen shaking hands with Mr. Clinton in a photograph provided today by the Obama campaign. Mr. Wright’s relationship with Senator Barack Obama, as his longtime pastor, has been the subject of considerable controversy in recent days because of incendiary excerpts of sermons Mr. Wright gave at their church, Trinity United Church of Christ, in Chicago. (more…)

Jodi Kantor
The New York Times
9 West 43rd Street
New York, New York 10036-3959

Dear Jodi:

Thank you for engaging in one of the biggest
misrepresentations of the truth I have ever seen in
sixty-five years. You sat and shared with me for two
hours. You told me you were doing a “Spiritual
Biography” of Senator Barack Obama. For two hours, I
shared with you how I thought he was the most
principled individual in public service that I have
ever met.

For two hours, I talked with you about how idealistic
he was. For two hours I shared with you what a genuine
human being he was. I told you how incredible he was as
a man who was an African American in public service,
and as a man who refused to announce his candidacy for
President until Carol Moseley Braun indicated one way
or the other whether or not she was going to run. (more…)

Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think
John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed
Gallup Press, 2008, 230 pp
.A new book by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed ought to have a profound and transforming influence on Americans’ view of their government’s confrontation with Islam. The book, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, presents the results of six years of Gallup polling in the Muslim world between 2001 and 2007. “With the random sampling method that Gallup used,” the authors explain, “results are statistically valid with a plus or minus 3-point margin of error. In totality, we surveyed a sample representing more than 90% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, making this the largest, most comprehensive study of contemporary Muslims ever done” (xi). Based on this data, Esposito and Mogahed have determined that Washington’s conflict with Islam is “more about policy than principle” (xi). The pivotal findings of this massive study for U.S. national security pertain to the motivation of the Muslims who oppose the United States and the authors’ claim that “[o]ne of the most important insights provided by Gallup’s data is that the issues that drive radicals are also issues for moderates” (93).

“As we have seen in the [Gallup] data, resentment against the West comes from what Muslims perceive as the West’s hatred and denigration of Islam; the Western belief that Arabs and Muslim are inferior; and their [Muslims’] fear of Western intervention, domination, or occupation” (141).

“As our [Gallup’s] data has demonstrated, the primary cause of broad-based anger and anti-Americanism is not a clash of civilizations but the perceived effect of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world” (156).

“[The Gallup data shows that] contrary to what the ‘They Hate Our Freedom’ thesis might predict, Muslims do not recommend or insist upon changes to Western culture or social norms as the path to better [Western-Muslim] relations. … Rather they call on the West to show greater respect for Islam, and they emphasize policy-related issues [U.S. interventionism; unqualified support for Israel; and protection for authoritarian Arab regimes]” (159). (more…)

“I’ve been to the same church — the same Christian church — for almost 20 years,” Obama said, stressing the word Christian and drawing cheers from the faithful in reply. “I was sworn in with my hand on the family Bible. Whenever I’m in the United States Senate, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. So if you get some silly e-mail . . . send it back to whoever sent it and tell them this is all crazy. Educate.“

The Christian author Jim Wallis was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart discussing his new book, the Great Awakening, last night, and one of the things he said was: “the dominance of the Christian Right over our politics is finally finished”. I really want to believe him, but, when I see politicians like Mr Obama flat out pandering to religious conservatives, acting like being called a Muslim was somehow a smear, something dishonorable, I have to wonder if that is in fact so.

Ok, Barak, we know you are “Christian”. We get it. But how about instead of taking the low road of defensive defiance you stop pandering to a right wing rumor mill?

A couple of your fore bearers were MUSLIM. Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. You want change?? Howzabout talking about being a president who has cultural roots that connect him to a world in which we are in the deepest ideological conflict. Isn’t it possible that you could use that heritage to reach out, to give substance to your call for CHANGE??

The High Road has you giving forth about tolerance, responding to the rumor mill with withering wit, dispatching the hate mongers to the political compost pile.The question to ask is why is it that being called Muslim can be used as a smear? Define the kind of people who would do that. Denounce them not because they called you a Muslim, but because what they did was bigoted & hateful.

Israel is in state of strategic paralysis. Its longstanding policy on Iran — depict Tehran as a global threat, pressure Washington to prevent Iran from going nuclear, and evade an American-Iranian dialogue — has been dealt a severe blow by the recently released National Intelligence Estimate.

The Iran policy Israel has pursued to date must now be put aside and a genuine effort must be made to develop a Plan B that recognizes the new strategic realities in the region. A broad diplomatic opening between Washington and Tehran is increasingly likely, and it is a distinct probability that an American-Iranian deal will entail some level of enrichment on Iranian soil. Arab states can be expected to step up efforts at rapprochement in order to avoid lagging behind the United States in warming up to Iran, making a policy of containing and isolating Tehran more and more difficult to pursue.

Israeli interests, therefore, would best be served by Jerusalem throwing its weight behind genuine diplomacy with Tehran in order to ensure that it is not left out of an American-Iranian deal. (more…)